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WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

Most people remember Gladstone as an old man. He reached the summit of his career when he had just struck seventy. After Easter, 1880, when he dethroned Lord Beaconsfield and formed his second Administration, the eighteen years of life that remained to him added nothing to his fame, and even in some respects detracted from it. Gradually he passed into the stage which was indicated by Labouchere's nickname of "The Grand Old Man"; and he enjoyed the homage which rightly attends the closing period of an exemplary life, wonderfully prolonged, and spent in the service of the nation. He had become historical before he died. But my recollections of him go back to the earlier sixties, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Palmerston's Government, and they become vivid at the point of time when he became Prime Minister—December, 1868.

In old age his appearance was impressive, through the combination of physical wear-and-tear with the unconquerable vitality of the spirit which dwelt within. The pictures of him as a young man represent him as distinctly handsome, with masses of dark hair thrown back from a truly noble forehead, and eyes of singular expressiveness. But in middle life—and in his case middle life was continued till he was sixty—he was neither as good-looking as he once had been, nor, as grand-looking as he eventually became. He looked much older than his age. When he met the new Parliament which had been elected at the end of 1868, he was only as old as Lord Curzon is now; but he looked old enough to be Lord Curzon's father. His life had been, as he was fond of saying, a life of contention; and the contention had left its mark on his face, with its deep furrows and careworn expression. Three years before he had felt, to use his own phrase, "sore with conflicts about the public expenditure" (in which old Palmerston had always beaten him), and to that soreness had been added traces of the fierce strife about Parliamentary Reform and Irish Disestablishment. F. D. Maurice thus described him: "His face is a very expressive one, hard-worked, as you say, and not perhaps specially happy; more indicative of struggle than of victory, though not without promise of that. He has preserved the type which I can remember that he bore at the University thirty-six years ago, though it has undergone curious development."

My own recollection exactly confirms Maurice's estimate. In Gladstone's face, as I used to see it in those days, there was no look of gladness or victory. He had, indeed, won a signal triumph at the General Election of 1868, and had attained the supreme object of a politician's ambition. But he did not look the least as if he enjoyed his honours, but rather as if he felt an insupportable burden of responsibility. He knew that he had an immense amount to do in carrying the reforms which Palmerston had burked, and, coming to the Premiership on the eve of sixty, he realized that the time for doing it was necessarily short. He seemed consumed by a burning and absorbing energy; and, when he found himself seriously hampered or strenuously opposed, he was angry with an anger which was all the more formidable because it never vented itself in an insolent or abusive word. A vulnerable temper kept resolutely under control had always been to me one of the most impressive features in human character.

Gladstone had won the General Election by asking the constituencies to approve the Disestablishment of the Irish Church; and this was the first task to which he addressed himself in the Parliament of 1869. It was often remarked about his speaking that in every Session he made at least one speech of which everyone said, "That was the finest thing Gladstone ever did." This was freely said of it he speech in which he introduced the Disestablishment Bill on the 1st of March, 1869, and again of that in which he wound up the debate on the Second Reading. In pure eloquence he had rivals, and in Parliamentary management superiors; but in the power of embodying principles in legislative form and preserving unity of purpose through a multitude of confusing minutiæ he had neither equal nor second.

The Disestablishment Bill passed easily through the Commons, but was threatened with disaster in the Lords, and it was with profound satisfaction that Mrs. Gladstone, most devoted and most helpful of wives, announced the result of the division on the Second Reading. Gladstone had been unwell, and had gone to bed early. Mrs. Gladstone who had been listening to the debate in the House of Lords, said to a friend, "I could not help it; I gave William a discreet poke. 'A majority of thirty-three, my dear.' 'Thank you, my dear,' he said, and turned round, and went to sleep on the other side." After a stormy passage through Committee, the Bill became law on the 26th of July.

So Gladstone's first great act of legislation ended, and he was athirst for more. Such momentous reforms as the Irish Land Act, the Education Act, the abolition of religious tests in the University, the abolition of purchase in the Army, and the establishment of the Ballot, filled Session after Session with excitement; and Gladstone pursued each in turn with an ardour which left his followers out of breath.

He was not very skilful in managing his party, or even his Cabinet. He kept his friendships and his official relations quite distinct. He never realized the force of the saying that men who have only worked together have only half lived together. It was truly said that he understood MAN, but not men; and meek followers in the House of Commons, who had sacrificed money, time, toil, health, and sometimes conscience, to the support of the Government, turned, like the crushed worm, when they found that Gladstone sternly ignored their presence in the Lobby, or, if forced to speak to them, called them by inappropriate names. His strenuousness of reforming purpose and strength of will were concealed by no lightness of touch, no give-and-take, no playfulness, no fun. He had little of that saving grace of humour which smoothes the practical working of life as much as it adds to its enjoyment. He was fiercely, terribly, incessantly in earnest; and unbroken earnestness, though admirable, exhausts and in the long run alienates.

There was yet another feature of his Parliamentary management which proved disastrous to his cause, and this was his tendency to what the vulgar call hair-splitting and the learned casuistry. At Oxford men are taught to distinguish with scrupulous care between propositions closely similar, but not identical. In the House of Commons they are satisfied with the roughest and broadest divisions between right and wrong; they see no shades of colour between black-and white. Hence arose two unfortunate incidents, which were nicknamed "The Ewelme Scandal" and "The Colliery Explosion"—two cases in which Gladstone, while observing the letter of an Act of Parliament, violated, or seemed to violate, its spirit in order to qualify highly deserving gentlemen for posts to which he wished to appoint them. By law the Rectory of Ewelme (in the gift of the Crown) could only be held by a graduate of the University of Oxford. Gladstone conferred it on a Cambridge man, who had to procure an ad eundem degree at Oxford before he could accept the preferment. By law no man could be made a paid member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council unless he had served as a judge. Gladstone made his Attorney-General, Sir John Collier, a Judge for three weeks, and then passed him on to the Judicial Committee. Both these appointments were angrily challenged in Parliament. Gladstone defended them with energy and skill, and logically his defence was unassailable. But these were cases where the plain man—and the House of Commons is full of plain men—feels, though he cannot prove, that there has been a departure from ordinary straightforwardness and fair dealing.

Yet again; the United States had a just complaint against us; arising out of the performances of the Alabama, which, built in an English dockyard and manned by an English crew, but owned by the Slaveowners' Confederacy, had got out to sea, and, during a two years' cruise of piracy and devastation, had harassed the Government of the United States. The quarrel had lasted for years, with ever-increasing gravity. Gladstone determined to end it; and, with that purpose, arranged for a Board of Arbitration, which sat at Geneva, and decided against England. We were heavily amerced by the sentence of this International Tribunal. We paid, but we did not like it. Gladstone gloried in the moral triumph of a settlement without bloodshed; but a large section of the nation, including many of his own party, felt that national honour had been lowered, and determined to avenge themselves on the Minister who had lowered it.

Meanwhile Disraeli, whom Gladstone had deposed in 1868, was watching the development of these events with sarcastic interest and effective criticism, till in 1872 he was able to liken the great Liberal, Government to "a range of exhausted volcanoes," and to say of its eminent leader that he "alternated between a menace and a sigh." In 1873 Gladstone introduced a wholly unworkable Bill for the reform of University education in Ireland. It pleased no one, and was defeated on the Second Reading. Gladstone resigned. The Queen sent for Disraeli; but Disraeli declined to repeat the experiment of governing the country without a majority in the House of Commons, and Gladstone was forced to resume office, though, of course, with immensely diminished authority. His Cabinet was all at sixes and sevens. There were resignations and rumours of resignation. He took the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, and, as some authorities contended, vacated his seat by doing so. Election after election went wrong, and the end was visibly at hand.

At the beginning of 1874 Gladstone, confined to his house by a cold, executed a coup d'état. He announced the Dissolution of Parliament, and promised, if his lease of power were renewed, to repeal the income-tax. The Times observed: "The Prime Minister descends upon Greenwich" (where he had taken refuge after being expelled from South Lancashire) "amid a shower of gold, and must needs prove as irresistible as the Father of the Gods." But this was too sanguine a forecast. Greenwich, which returned two members, placed Gladstone second on the poll, below a local distiller, while his followers were blown out of their seats like chaff before the wind. When the General Election was over, the Tories had a majority of forty-six. Gladstone, after some hesitation, resigned without waiting to meet a hostile Parliament. Disraeli became Prime Minister for the second time; and in addressing the new House of Commons he paid a generous compliment to his great antagonist. "If," he said, "I had been a follower of a Parliamentary chief so eminent, even if I thought he had erred, I should have been disposed rather to exhibit sympathy than to offer criticism. I should remember the great victories which he had fought and won; I should remember his illustrious career; its continuous success and splendour, not its accidental or even disastrous mistakes."

The roost loyal Gladstonian cannot improve upon that tribute, and Gladstone's greatest day was yet to come.